Emory University
Georgia
1836
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): blue/gold (1917-1922); gold/blue (1923-1933); blue/gold (1934-1935)
Academic hood lists published by the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) in 1927 and 1948 described the hood lining of Emory University as navy blue with a gold chevron.
Reflecting the evolution of the university’s blue from a dark shade to a medium shade, a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) and an IBAC list from 1969 both described the university’s hood lining as blue with a gold chevron. Strangely, a 1972 IBAC list reverts to the original dark blue and gold colors.
It is very likely that the Intercollegiate Bureau never officially registered a hood lining pattern for Emory and that the descriptions in IBAC lists were nothing more than a record of the university’s colors attached to a hypothetical heraldic pattern, because the Bureau had already assigned a dark blue hood lining with a gold chevron to Simmons College in Massachusetts between 1906 and 1912.
Here Emory University has been reassigned a dark blue hood lining with a gold bar, a heraldic ordinary the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume was using to avoid duplication problems like this as early as 1902.
The students at Emory College had been using blue and gold for many years before the school colors were first mentioned in an October 1899 student newspaper, but exactly when and how the colors were officially chosen is unknown. The university used a dark blue until the middle of the 20th century. Since then, Emory’s blue has lightened to a medium shade of “true” blue.
